Does Diversity Drive Down Trust?

Some researchers claim that diverse populations lead to less trust. Generalized trust is a core value that leads to positive outcomes in societies--from greater tolerance of minority groups and immigrants and willingness to do good deeds, to less corruption, more social welfare and education spending, more open markets, and better functioning government. Generalized trust fundamentally rests upon a foundation of respect for diversity, but at the same time arguing that societies have a common culture. It is the idea that people have a shared fate. Generalized trust rests upon a foundation of economic equality. Yet some claim that diversity leads to less trust rather than more trust. Trusting people who are different from yourself is atypical of most people, they claim. I dispute this--arguing that generalized trust is largely unrelated to population diversity. It is not diversity that matters--it is how populations are distributed. I show that trust is lower not in diverse societies, but rather in societies with large minority groups that are segregated from the majority groups. Minority residential segregation leads to less trust because it leads to less interaction across different groups in society--and leads minorities to associate only with each other, to form their own political organizations, and to see their fate as less dependent upon majority groups. I then discuss how economic inequality and the rule of law shape the relationship between trust and minority residential segregation.Trust, Diversity, Corruption

Public Support for Pro-Choice Abortion Policies in the Nation and States: Changes and Stability After the \u3cem\u3eRoe\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eDoe\u3c/em\u3e Decisions

The Supreme Court, according to the legendary Mr. Dooley, follows the election returns. In 1973, the Court\u27s two landmark decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, struck down statutes in the forty-six states where abortions were not permitted under any circumstances or were allowed only to save the life of the woman during the first three months of pregnancy. There had been a considerable increase in the level of support for the pro-choice position among the public in the few years preceding Roe and Doe. But did the decisions themselves lead to even more public support for that position? What variations do we find among the states and where has the increase in public support for the pro-choice position seemed the most dramatic? Finally, what has been the impact of the abortion controversy on the political process? We shall examine these questions here and suggest some tentative answers. First, we shall consider the available national poll evidence. Second, we shall examine variations in political opinion on abortion policies in the states. Finally, we shall examine the abortion controversy as it has affected legislative decision making and electoral politics. When we consider the variations among the states, we shall present estimates of state public opinion on abortion policy through a computer simulation technique, developed by the second author and refined jointly by us, which permits us to get approximate figures on state opinions from national surveys

Will We All Hunker Down? The Impact of Immigration and Diversity on Local Communities in Spain

This article engages with the scholarly debate on the supposed negative effect of immigration and diversity, and analyses its effect on two different forms of trust - community trust and generalized trust - in Spain. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, with census section level data of representative samples of all the Spanish municipalities, we test the propositions that relate greater ethnic diversity to social trust. Secondly, we address the limitations intrinsic to the crude measurement of diversity of the Herfindahl index with a systematic consideration of multiple alternative indicators of immigration-related diversity. We find evidence of a negative effect of diversity on community trust but none on generalized trust. Hence, our findings lend some support to the recent scholarship that questions that increasing diversity has a ‘hunkering down’ effect

Discovery of [11C]MK-6884: a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agent for the study of M4 muscarinic receptor positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) in neurodegenerative diseases

The measurement of receptor occupancy (RO) using positron emission tomography (PET) has been instrumental in guiding discovery and development of CNS directed therapeutics. We and others have investigated muscarinic acetylcholine receptor 4 (M4) positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) for the treatment of symptoms associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. In this article, we describe the synthesis, in vitro, and in vivo characterization of a series of central pyridine-related M4 PAMs that can be conveniently radiolabeled with carbon-11 as PET tracers for the in vivo imaging of an allosteric binding site of the M4 receptor. We first demonstrated its feasibility by mapping the receptor distribution in mouse brain and confirming that a lead molecule 1 binds selectively to the receptor only in the presence of the orthosteric agonist carbachol. Through a competitive binding affinity assay and a number of physiochemical properties filters, several related compounds were identified as candidates for in vivo evaluation. These candidates were then radiolabeled with 11C and studied in vivo in rhesus monkeys. This research eventually led to the discovery of the clinical radiotracer candidate [11C]MK-6884

All for All: Equality, Corruption and Social Trust

The importance of social trust has become widely accepted in the social sciences. A number of explanations have been put forward for the stark variation in social trust among countries. Among these, participation in voluntary associations received most attention. Yet, there is scant evidence that participation can lead to trust. In this paper, we shall examine a variable that has not gotten the attention we think it deserves in the discussion about the sources of generalized trust, namely equality. We conceptualize equality in two dimensions: One is economic equality and the other is equality of opportunity. The omission of both these dimensions of equality in the social capital literature is peculiar for several reasons. One is that it is obvious that the countries that score highest on social trust also rank highest on economic equality, namely the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and Canada. Secondly, these are countries have put a lot of effort in creating equality of opportunity, not least in regard to their policies for public education, health care, labor market opportunities and (more recently) gender equality. The argument for increasing social trust by reducing inequality has largely been ignored in the policy debates about social trust. Social capital research has to a large extent been used by several governments and policy organizations to send a message to people that the bad things in their society is caused by too little volunteering. The policy implications that follows from our research is that the low levels of trust and social capital that plague many countries are caused by too little government action to reduce inequality. However, many countries with low levels of social trust and social capital may be stuck in what is known as a social trap. The logic of such a situation is the following. Social trust will not increase because massive social inequality prevails, but the public policies that could remedy this situation can not be established precisely because there is a genuine lack of trust. This lack of trust concerns both “other people” and the government institutions that are needed to implement universal policies

Mass Education, State-Building and Equality: Searching for the Roots of Corruption

The roots of corruption are highly contested. We argue that there is a path dependence across almost a century and a half and present five theoretical arguments for the existence of a causal mechanism between universal education and control of corruption. We show a powerful statistical link between education levels in 1870 and corruption levels in 2010 for 78 countries, a relationship that remains strong even when controlling for change in the level of education, gross national product per capita, and democratic governance. Regime type is generally not significant. We then trace early education to levels of economic equality in the late 19th and early 21st centuries—and argue that societies with more equality educated more of their citizens, which then gave their citizens more opportunities and power, reducing corruption. We present historical evidence from Europe and Spanish, British, and French colonies that strong states provided more education to their publics—and that such states were themselves more common where economic disparities were smaller